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January 20, 2013

"Very rarely" ain't never

I should be used to it, but I still am flabbergasted when reporting on the scientific community creates an alarming narrative out of something that they, in some study, show has happened before and thus is not only not unprecedented but in all likelihood is a natural recurring event.

It would seem to me, though what do I know, that if you show that something that is occurring in nature today has occurred in the past your first supposition should be that what caused it in the past is causing it again. If, after all, you can not explain the previous occurrence what basis do you have in attributing the current event to some new cause?

Yet the scientific community consistently is so lacking in intellectual curiosity and so focused on maintaining their death grip hold on their cash cow of "climate change" that they will immediately attribute or leave the impression that current natural recurring events are the result of man made climate change. They often do this without attempting to explain or understand the previous occurrences which could not possibly be attributable to man's influence. A recent example of this comes from a new study undertaken to look for

... new clues about the recent rapid ice loss from the West Antarctic Ice Sheet and help scientists make better predictions about future sea-level rise.

First off let me just ask, how can you have a better basis for for predicting the future when you have no explanation for the past? At the bottom of the article we are told that this rather expensive research was needed in order to

... improve the accuracy of computer models that are essential to predict future ice loss in the Amundsen Sea sector of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet and its likely contribution to global sea-level rise.

This is all well and good but the fact of the matter is that in order to determine future ice loss don't you need to understand why you are losing ice in the first place? (emphasis mine)

Reporting this month in the journal Geology a team of researchers from British Antarctic Survey (BAS), the Alfred Wegener Institute for Polar and Marine Research (AWI) and the University of Tromsø presents a timeline for ice loss and glacier retreat in the Amundsen Sea region of West Antarctica. The team concludes that the rapid changes observed by satellites over the last 20 years at Pine Island and Thwaites glaciers may well be exceptional and are unlikely to have happened more than three or four times in the last 10,000 years.

At the risk of sounding naive, how could something that has ."happened more than three or four times in the last 10,000 years." be refereed to in the same sentence as " exceptional"? I would think that, in a geological time frame, something that has occurred three or four times in 10,000 years is not all that exceptional and obviously is not unprecedented.

After a somewhat confusing description by the lead author of the study of what the team is investigating and why:

"As snow and ice builds up on the vast Antarctic Ice Sheet, the ice flows from the centre of the continent through glaciers towards the sea where it often forms floating ice shelves and eventually breaks off as icebergs. The floating ice shelves hold back the ice on land. A critical issue for us is to understand how the 'grounding line' – the position where the ice sitting on land (glaciers) begins to float (ice shelves) – has retreated landward over time. Satellite data are available only for the last 20 years and show that since 1992 the Pine Island and Thwaites glaciers have experienced significant thinning (melting), flow acceleration and rapid landward retreat of their grounding lines, with that of Pine Island Glacier having retreated up to 25 km. It's possible that the grounding lines may retreat even further inland over coming decades....

We are again informed that this is not a unique event:

" ...Our study has revealed that episodes of fast glacier retreat similar to that observed over recent decades can only have occurred very rarely during the previous 10,000 years."

The first question it seems to me that a scientist interested in truly investigating this or a journalist reporting on this would ask is "what caused the previous instances of rapid retreat?" But the question is not addressed in the article and so far as I have been able to discover, nowhere do the scientist attempt to explain previous occurrences.

. However, it is unknown if the contemporary dynamic changes are simply part of long-term WAIS retreat since the Last Glacial Maximum (LGM, ca. 23,000–19,000 cal. yr B.P.), or solely recent phenomena.

Putting aside that these scientist are investigating a phenomena which they have labeled exceptional based on "only... 20 years of satellite data" they can not even determine if these changes are unique or natural but wish to use their findings to "improve the accuracy of computer models that are essential to predict future ice loss... and its likely contribution to global sea-level rise."
Well how exactly do you do that? How do you use a phenomena that you can not explain to predict future ice loss?

When the skeptic community makes the charge that climate models are based on nothing more than suppositions not grounded in scientific reality they are accused of somehow being unscientific deniers. Yet here we have just such an example of how the scientific community creates suppositions to program their climate models and thus feed the climate change academic complexes coffers for future tax payer funded research.

"Very rarely"ain't never and to use current geological and climatic events which, by their own admission, are neither unprecedented or often times even all that unique as a basis to fund research is nothing less than fraud. The fact that they can not even explain the previous events but simply label current similar events as being caused by man made influences is not only unscientific, it is immoral.

Though immorality in the scientific community is neither unprecedented or unique.